Triton Shorethief

A vanilla 1/2 for a single blue mana, which puts the entire evaluation on context rather than text. The extra point of toughness over the standard 1/1 is the whole distinction: it survives a lone pinger, blocks and trades up against fragile attackers, and generally does more sitting still than a one-power body with one toughness ever could. As a Merfolk Rogue it also feeds two creature-type buckets at once, so it counts for tribal payoffs that reward bodies of a given type regardless of what those bodies actually do. There is no trigger, no activated ability, no upside tucked into the type line; the design is common-rarity ballast, meant to give an aggressive blue curve a turn-one drop and a tribal deck a cheap warm body. It earns a slot only where creature-type synergy or a low blue curve is doing real work, and it asks nothing of the deck around it beyond space.